When an invitation to The Ball arrives at the Ash girl's house, from Prince Amir, she can't bring herself to believe that she, like her sisters, can go. With her mother dead and her father away, she must learn to fight the monsters that have slithered and insinuated their way into her heart and mind. In this wondrous drama Timberlake Wertenbaker explores the beauty and terror inherent in growing up.The Ash Girl premiered at Birmingham Rep in 2001.
THE STORY: Mary Traverse, the pretty, carefully schooled daughter of a wealthy London merchant, chafes at her pampered existence, and hungers for knowledge and experience of the outside world. Leaving her father's protection she is, at first, shock
In return for aid in war, King Pandion of Athens gives his daughter in marriage to Tereus, King of Thrace. But once in Thrace Procne misses her sister Philomele and sets out to fetch her from Athens. On the way back Tereus deceives and seduces Philomele, silencing her by tearing out her tongue.
America. 1776. Christian is a Quaker. His family came to America to live in peace. But he is a young man fired up by dreams of revolution. Should he defy his community and pick up a gun? Thomas Jefferson is an idealist, with a vision of liberty for all. But America is a fractured coalition of states, in a bloody war for independence. How will he balance the ideal with the reality? Susanna was born a slave. But the British promise liberation for those who join their fight against the revolution. Where does true freedom lie? Jefferson's Garden by Timberlake Wertenbaker premiered at Watford Palace Theatre in February 2015.
Heroism is danger and risk, and frankly, until now, it's been male. In the near future a group of women gather in a half-built structure on Winter Hill in Bolton. Is it a chance to have a drink with friends? Is it a book club discussing famous heroines? Or is it a revolution? Set in the near future, Winter Hill centres on a eight women as they deal with the sale of local land to developers of a luxurious skyscraper hotel. Questioning the lengths people should go in the name of a cause, Timberlake Wertenbaker's Winter Hill premiered at the Octagon Theatre, Bolton, in May 2017.
Millie, a director, discusses with her actors, Ian and Tom, how to interpret two famous historical figures from the nineteenth century. It's 1831. The naturalist Charles Darwin is invited to travel with Robert Fitzroy into uncharted waters off the coast of South America aboard 'The Beagle'. Their five year journey is fraught with philosophical and personal tensions. Fitzroy, a staunch Christian, has faith in the unquestionable authority of the Bible; Darwin begins to explore a more radical vision, his theory of natural selection. A meditation on history and human relationships, After Darwin links past and present through these five characters, and raises timeless questions about faith, friendship and how we interpret the past. After Darwin was first performed in July 1998, at Hampstead Theatre, London.
This title offers a comprehensive overview of Wertenbaker's playwriting career which spans more than 30 years of stage plays. It considers the contexts of their initial productions by a range of companies and institutions, including the Royal Court, the Arcola and the Women's Theatre Group
This collection provides the first full-length investigation of the oeuvre of one of Britain's leading dramatists: Timberlake Wertenbaker. By considering the polyglot playwright's theatre from translations and adaptations to new plays as a dynamic continuum of «translations and transformations», Maya Roth and Sara Freeman create an intriguing, focused frame for understanding Wertenbaker's work as distinctly cross-cultural, theatrically rich, and intertextual, providing a prescient case study of the translational turn emerging in international theatre today. The contributors investigate translation theory and practice through Wertenbaker's diverse linguistic and genre translations - from French, ancient Greek, and Italian to English, and from myth, history, classics, fairytale, and literature to the stage. Interrelated chapters by scholars and artists from varied countries, language traditions, and disciplines use performance studies, comparative literature, feminist theory, and cultural anthropology to position Wertenbaker's theatre as a critical nexus for analyzing - and imagining - cross-historical dialogues with contemporary audiences and our plural legacies. Thanks to its substantive engagement with the ethics, theories, and collaborative practices of theatrical translation and adaptation more broadly, and its equally rigorous examination of Wertenbaker's hybridic politics and poetics, this collection can serve as a useful resource for scholars and artists, both.
